Book Review: Till We Have Faces

[osprey_archer]

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all the time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

I first read C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces years ago - in high school? in college? - before I was writing regular reviews of my reading. But I remember that I didn’t much like it, and found it especially aggravating how the narrative kept harping on how Orual’s ugliness made her unlovable.

And yet - and yet. There’s a scene near the end, where Orual finds herself reading her complaint to the gods. Not the complaint that is this book that you hold in your hands, which Orual wrote with all the customary self-justifications and evasions of mortals; but the real complaint at the center of her heart in all its petty childish selfishness, the raw molten hurt fury that Orual’s beloved half-sister Psyche could love anything, anything aside from Orual.

That moment stuck with me. That was why I wanted to read the book again, to see if I would understand it better this time, and I did, and I loved it.

On that first high school read, I believed Orual’s insistence on her own unlovability, and also mistook Orual’s opinion for Lewis’s. Never mind that the last four chapters of the book systematically refute Orual’s opinion on this matter, culminating in that speech that so stunned me that I remembered the impact for years. The narrator said it, so obviously it was true, and just as obviously the author’s opinion!

But, no, it isn’t at all, and indeed, the last few chapters of this book are all about the fact that Orual’s belief in her own unlovability has led her to feel unloved, never mind how many people love her enormously. They don’t love her the way she wants them to, and so their love is as nothing. Bardia loves her as his queen and comrade-in-arms whom he would die for at the drop of a hat… but he’s not in love with her. Her tutor the Fox loves her so much that he stays in Glome as her counselor even after she frees him… but right after he got his freedom, he considered perhaps going home to Greece. Well, what good is a love that can even think about leaving you?

And Psyche! Psyche! Orual wants Psyche to love her most and best and only, the way Psyche perhaps loved her as a baby. And instead, the girl insists on growing up and making other friends and finding inner resources and not needing Orual anymore.

But what actually begins to get through to Orual is the story of her other sister, Redival, of whom Orual has always spoken with contempt. The pretty, flighty, thoughtless sister, who ended up married to a man who “never listened to a word she said.” (This is clearly meant to show that their marriage isn’t very happy. It’s such a contrast to That Hideous Strength, where Jane sighs that Mark doesn’t listen to her anymore, and Mrs. Dimble, the exemplar of a Christian wife, is like, ah well, how could a man listen to all his wife’s prattle? So glad that littlerhymes and I ended the Lewis read on Till We Have Faces rather than That Hideous Strength.)

As she is writing this complaint to the gods, Orual remembers that as very little girls, she and Redival had been friends. It was only after the Fox came, after Psyche was born, that Orual dropped Redival - and Orual learns, to her amazement, that Redival was terribly lonely afterward. It had never before occurred to Orual to consider that moment through Redival’s eyes - to imagine that the loss of Orual’s love could ever hurt anyone’s feelings. “For it had been somehow settled in my mind from the very beginning that I was the pitiable and ill-used one. She had her gold curls, hadn’t she?”

And if Orual had been mistaken in this fundamental assumption, then might she, perhaps, be wrong about other things? And from there, the whole structure of her grievance against the gods begins to unravel. Did the gods take Psyche from you, Orual? Or did you drive her away?

Comments

[osprey_archer]

One of the tragedies of the book is that Orual realizes, far too late for it to do any good, that it could indeed have been the tale of three sisters. Would losing Psyche have been less devastating if she could at least have fallen on Redival's shoulder and cried about it?

And yes, a girlboss heroine, such a change from the girlboss villains like Jadis and the Lady of the Green Kirtle! Although Orual is really more of an anti-heroine, isn't she?

Trying to imagine Jadis having this eleventh-hour realization that perhaps she could have reconciled with her sister instead of blowing up the whole world... maybe when you've committed that hard to being wrong, it becomes impossible to repent, though.

[littlerhymes]

Orual is too conflicted and interesting to be a true girlboss. How many times can I look at the word girlboss before it loses all meaning.

JADIS WOULD NEVER she would burn the whole world down before reconciling with her sister and in fact did.